


kids are dying out in the snow.

by ghostshaming



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Discussion of Hypothetical Character Death, Gen, Not Really Character Death, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Sibling Bonding, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 09:25:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19664527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostshaming/pseuds/ghostshaming
Summary: SPOILERS FOR SEASON THREESomewhere between the smear of streetlights and the wild thump of her heart, it occurs to Nancy that her brother might be dead.





	kids are dying out in the snow.

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS FOR SEASON THREE
> 
> title from "Neighborhood #3 (Power's Out)", by Arcade Fire

_kids are dying out in the snow,_

_look at ‘em go, look at ‘em go._

* * *

Somewhere between the smear of streetlights and the wild thump of her heart, it occurs to Nancy that her brother might be dead. The thought slips in like a draft, cold in her chest, and she fails to suppress a shudder.

“You okay?” Jonathan’s eyes have been flicking between the road and the rearview mirrors, but he looks over for the briefest moment.

“Yeah.” She can’t say it, not right now. Not with the kids in the backseat, and something unspeakable still on their tail, lumbering down State Road 25. “Eyes on the road.”

Eyes on the road, mind on the monster. There’s no room for grief right now. Mike might be dead – and El and Max with him – but there isn’t a goddamn thing Nancy can do about it. It’s a silent truth. They’ll go back to the mall eventually, and they’ll find the kids’ bodies, and then they’ll keep living. It feels just like that terrible night in November, scrambling into the Byers’ house to find nothing but bloody floorboards. It feels like the endless afternoon she spent listening to chopper blades and radio static, waiting for Hopper to get back from the junkyard.

It’s Lucas who finally says it.

“If it’s El he wants, why is he even following us?”

For a few seconds, the car is quiet and still. Jonathan swallows. Will leans his head into the window, eyes screwed shut against the implications.

“Thought you were a few short.” Steve’s bruised face is all in shadows, tipped over the backseat to meet Jonathan’s eyes in the mirror. “Where is she, anyway?”

The silence is even worse this time. It’s thick and dark, seeping into Nancy’s lungs like cigarette smoke. She presses her fists against her eyes and sinks down in her seat.

“We got separated,” Jonathan answers at last. The waver in his voice is faint, but Nancy couldn’t miss it if she tried. She thinks of a day in November, of plush carpet and boxes small enough for a child. Mike isn’t a child, now. “Back at the mall, hiding from this thing.”

“And you _left_ them there?” Robin, this time, her tone full of shock and outrage. In the dark, Nancy can only picture an ill-fitting band uniform, a shiny snare drum. She’s seen Robin a million times, and she can barely imagine the details of her face.

Jonathan doesn’t answer. He just takes a deep breath, his eyes tense and narrowed at the road. There’s a muted roar from behind the car; he lays his foot harder into the gas pedal, like he can outrun his own thoughts.

“They never came out,” someone finally says, and it takes Nancy a moment to realize it was Will. His voice is quiet, damp, utterly miserable, like he’s been silently grieving a truth no one else has dared to speak.

“The hell do you mean?” Steve presses, leaning farther up. His hands clench against the corners of Will’s headrest, eyes flicking between him and the others. There’s a willing disconnect in his voice, something he’s hovering around and reluctant to touch. Something they’re _all_ reluctant to touch.

Nancy clenches her jaw and closes her eyes. “They never came out of the mall, Steve,” she repeats. _Don’t you understand? Can’t you see the choice we had to make?_

“So why didn’t you go _find_ them?” he shoots back.

“Did you see the monster?” Jonathan’s eyes jump back to the mirror; the car swerves for just a moment, as if startled by his shout. “Is that _not_ something you noticed?”

“Yeah, no _shit_!” There’s a growing tension in Steve’s voice, a mix of panic and horror and anger. “And maybe I wouldn’t have hopped in the car if I noticed that we _left children behind_!”

“Oh, then by all means, take the wheel!” Jonathan bites. Nancy wants to reach over, lay her hand on his arm and tell him to _calm down_ , but she’s too busy trying to hold her own self together. It’s growing harder and harder with each moment. “Let’s just lead the monster right back to the mall, and if the kids are still alive, maybe it can take care of that for us!”

His words echo in the silence that follows, sharp and wild. Nancy can feel the kids recoil behind her, sinking into themselves. There are no gasps, no horrified shouts. They knew.

Robin sits up straighter, uniform rustling. “ _If_ they’re alive?” It’s quiet, mournfully inquisitive rather than panicked. Nancy opens her eyes, and sees the girl’s solemn, white face in the mirror.

“It wanted El,” Will answers, barely above a whisper. He’s pulled his knobby knees up into the seat, like he’s trying to make himself as small as possible. He’s always trying to make himself small. “If it’s following us…”

“It already got them.” Lucas isn’t small. Lucas is anger and courage and bravado, tucked behind asthma and a baseball cap. He always has been. But in the face of a monstrous possibility, there’s something absent behind his eyes. Not steel, or fire, but fog, damp and suffocating.

“You don’t know that,” Steve all but chokes, fist coming down on the headrest. “None of us know that.”

“You’re right.” Jonathan doesn’t look back. His voice is as steady as he can make it. “We don’t.”

“Then get Dustin to call them. He can call them, right? On his big radio?”

Lucas shakes his head. “Monster crushed the walkie.”

“Shit,” Robin breathes out, speaking what’s on everyone’s minds. “ _Shit_.”

Nancy doesn’t have to close her eyes to hear the crack of plastic, the fizzle to radio silence. Up on his hill, Dustin is probably assuming the worst. _Erica_ is probably assuming the worst. But at least, for the two of them, the worst isn’t so absolute. Erica Sinclair will be going home with her brother tonight, as long as Nancy has anything to do with it.

“So,” Steve starts. “They’re stranded there with the Russians.” Anxiety is building in his voice, a tone quickly becoming as familiar as the swoop of his hair, or the spread of his grin. “They’re stranded there with _Russians_ , and Billy fucking _Hargrove_ , without any communication. Great! That’s fucking incredible! They’re _kids_ , for Christ’s-”

“So are _we_ , Steve!” Nancy whirls around so fast it tweaks her neck. The tears that have been welling in her eyes threaten to spill, and she swallows them back. Her tongue tastes like iron and poison. “We’re _all_ kids, and we’re all in over our heads, and we’re all terrified. We’re _terrified._ So sue us for hitting the goddamn gas and not letting these two die too!”

She regrets the words as soon as she sees Lucas and Will, their eyes snapping up in dread.

Jonathan meets Will’s frantic glance in the mirror, shaking his head quickly. “No. _No_.” Nancy can feel the doubt coming off of him in waves, filling up the whole car like water. They’re all going to drown before the monster gets to them.

“You picked us over them,” Lucas says. It’s not a question; it sounds like a life sentence, and Nancy knows immediately that she’s never going to shake it. No matter what happens, those words are going to follow her forever. She picked Lucas, and left behind his girlfriend. She picked Will, and left behind his best friend.

She picked them – she picked _herself_ \- and left behind her baby brother.

“Hey.” Robin leans forward, her voice soft and mediating. “No one _picked_ anyone. We had to get the monster away from them. This _helped_ them.”

Nancy nods, even though no one can see it. She _helped_ them. She _helped_ Mike and Max and El. That was the plan all along. They were safe in the mall, and Billy was unconscious, so they lured the monster away. They lured it _away_.

Only, she remembers. She’ll always remember. That half-minute between the crunch of metal and the squeal of her car’s tires, leaping in next to Jonathan and thinking to herself, _They never came out, they never came out, they never came out._ The mall flashing in orange and blue and pink, the concrete cracking beneath the monster’s feet. It had disappeared, for a minute. It had disappeared, and _they never came out_ , and the last time she saw Mike he was screaming her name.

The radio in Steve’s lap picks that moment to buzz into life.

“ _Dusty-bun, you copy?”_

* * *

Mike has a concussion. He throws up on the EMT’s shoes after half an hour of insisting he’s fine, and that’s how Nancy finds him, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and looking like something that’s been pulled out of a grave.

She shouldn’t joke like that, but sometimes joking is all any of them _can_ do.

“You look like shit,” Mike says.

“You look worse than shit.” Nancy sits down next to him, feet swinging from the edge of the ambulance. In the harsh, sterile light, everything feels a bit less like a dream.

Mike sniffs. “Is Mom coming? They want me to go to the hospital.” He had been unconscious, the EMT told her, and she’s had a solid knot in her stomach since.

“No one was home.” Despite the crash, the Toddfather’s car phone was still in working shape when Nancy tried it, hoping against hope that this wasn’t the rare night Ted Wheeler left his La-Z-Boy. Unfortunately, their bad luck wasn’t willing to let up.

“Not surprised,” Mike mumbles, but there’s not enough vitriol in his voice for it to be genuine. He was hoping for a different answer, this time.

Nancy tucks her hands under her thighs and looks out at the rest of the parking lot. More and more people are starting to pour in, in emergency vehicles and midsize sedans, even on foot. Helping hands, prying eyes, news cameras attached to nosy button-downs. With a pile of people-sludge cooling on the food court floor, she’s not sure how the government is going to spin this one. At the moment, though, she can’t bring herself to care. Her brain is too exhausted.

“I’m sorry I left you.” She doesn’t mean to say it, but the guilt has been growing steadily in her chest for hours.

Mike furrows his brow. “What?”

“We left, before you guys got out. I’m sorry.” Her voice feels hoarse and pained, and she wants nothing more than to climb into the gurney herself and sleep. She doesn’t want to bring back up the terror of that car ride, the images in her mind of full-sized coffins and calls to parents. She doesn’t want to make it real, to risk that this is some dream she can still wake up from.

“You kept everyone else safe,” Mike answers, matter-of-fact as ever. Even now, there’s that trace of leadership in his posture, in the way he holds his blood-crusted head. “More people might’ve died if you hadn’t.”

“When the three of you didn’t show up…” She turns towards him, but her eyes flick down and away, landing on the asphalt. “I was scared, Mike. It was a choice I didn’t want to make.

“It was a choice you shouldn’t have _had_ to make,” he answers. For a ridiculous moment, it feels like he might be the older brother, like he might have been the wise one all this time, guiding her through a terrifying life. “Maybe I would’ve made the same call, you never know.”

“You wouldn’t.” Nancy shakes her head, sure of her answer. “All of you kids… You’re braver than me. Than _us_.” The _teens_ , she means, but it isn’t correct anymore. They’re all teenagers. Mike and his little gang are almost in high school, and even in the middle of this fear and panic and violence, the thought strikes her as ridiculous. She can still remember his first day of kindergarten in perfect clarity. The way he clenched his fists around his backpack straps like lifelines, the way his hair curled perfectly on his forehead; she never wants to let go of it. She never wants to let go of _him_.

Mike lets out a snort, almost a laugh. “Uh, I don’t know if you were there, but _you_ were the one shooting the monster back at-”

“And you were the first one to rush forward when it grabbed El,” Nancy cuts in, heart pounding. “The first one, Mike, and you didn’t even have a weapon.” She’d only watched from the side, hands squeezing the shotgun, _hoping hoping hoping_ her shot would land. Hoping for their safety, but also for her own.

Mike had never thought of his own.

“I _told_ you,” he says, turning away. “I can’t lose her again. I _can’t_.”

“And I can’t lose _you_!”

The words echo in the back of the ambulance. More sirens race down the highway; another portion of the mall’s roof crumbles into the fire.

“I can’t lose you,” she finally repeats, glancing over. He’s staring at the pavement, brows furrowed, like he’s trying very hard to think about anything other than what Nancy is saying. “I keep thinking I have, and it kills me every single time.”

“I’m _fine_.” Mike’s voice is tense, but not sharp. He doesn’t look up. “I told you, it’s not even bleeding anymore.”

Nancy ignores him. “When I left the mall,” she says, quieter, “I thought you were dead.”

“Oh.” It’s barely a breath. Mike fidgets, swings his feet, looks anywhere but to his left. “I-”

“When I got back to the Byers’ house last year, I thought you were dead. When I heard there were casualties at the middle school, two years ago, _I thought you were dead_.”

“You don’t have to worry about me!” Mike tries to cut in. “I have _El_ , she-”

“And you should also have _me_.” Nancy finally reaches out, grasping his shoulder with one scraped hand. He winces as he turns, head clearly aching, but he lets his eyes meet Nancy’s. “I keep promising I’m gonna do better, but I keep screwing it up. Mom and Dad are never there, _I’m_ never there, and I _want_ to be. I really want to be there, Mike.” 

Something sparkles in the edge of Mike’s eye, and he wipes it before Nancy can look too closely. He leaves a smear of blood on his cheek.

“I’m _fine_.” It’s not convincing at all. “Besides, you have your own shit.”

Nancy could almost _laugh_. “Most of it’s the same shit, you goof.” And it’s true, really. In the year following that first, terrible November, they woke up with the same screams in their throats, the same monster’s skin gleaming from every dark corner. They poured glasses of water from the same taps and sat behind closed doors, hugging their knees to their chests and missing a couple of girls far beyond their reach. Sometimes, Nancy had the audacity to be bitter. She would stare at photo strips tacked to her walls and think, _He got Will back. He got someone back_. But then she would see him skulking in the basement, or hear him crying in the hours before dawn, and realize the truth.

He did get Will back, but he didn’t get all of him _self_ back.

“Well,” Mike finally says, letting the shock blanket fall from his shoulders, “you’re gonna have to work way harder to get rid of me.”

The words pain Nancy a little, but she forces a smile. “Damn, that’s what I was afraid of.”

“Might have to take me out yourself, before you go crazy.”

“Only in my dreams.”

She loops an arm up and over Mike’s neck, and he declines to shuffle away, and for a second, in the glow of the burning mall, she can almost imagine that he’s just a normal kid. She can grab him by the backpack, hold him safe at the edge of traffic, watch him frown under those raucous curls.

She can imagine that she’s never going to lose him. Because she will, one day, she thinks. Every time they think this is over, it bursts back into their lives, danger blazing, and it _takes and takes_. And next time, or the time after that, it might take Mike. He’ll rush forward without a weapon, or he’ll refuse to leave someone’s side, or he’ll be too slow, too distracted by all of the people he cares about _so damn much_. It will be Nancy trying to figure out how to tell their parents, instead of Max. It will be her planning a funeral, instead of Jonathan or Joyce.

And Mike won’t regret it. Somehow, that’s the hardest part. Her brave little brother, always rushing toward the fire, never caring that he’ll catch alight. One day the flames will lick, and he won’t stop to save himself.

“Let’s get you to the hospital,” Nancy finally says, voice gentle. She squeezes him with one arm, and then lets go.

Mike wrinkles his nose a little. “What if we don’t?”

“Let them look at your head, and I’ll get you McDonald’s.”

A tiny grin slides onto his face, dopey and embarrassed, and for half of a moment, Nancy can almost imagine.


End file.
